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This prestigious ballet company for years offered audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind viewers could understand the performance on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking new work, the complete audience will experience such descriptions within a work that investigates how blindness can transform our reactions to sensation, audio and storytelling.

Blind Creator Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, the artist is guided by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an different form of awareness for all people. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the score, establishes the heart of the show on stage.

"Producing exceptional ballet and musical theater for everyone" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the troupe is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – inviting artists and patrons to discover dance in life-changing innovative methods," he explained.

Multiple Choreographers Partner on Fresh Work

The recent commission is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was established on the concept of access. Following a decade, we're pushing that concept more to consider how impaired perspectives can mold our performance style, and encourage patrons of every capability and histories to encounter ballet in new ways."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he recognized that sighted people who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions found it helped them comprehend dance, which can look so complex.

Touching Partnership Between Expert and Non-Professional Dancers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has realized that it truly "involves a lot of emotion and sentiments" and activates senses, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sun to orient his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I continued moving to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a good assistant to me. The sunlight could be a powerful symbol. So the story originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Distinct Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a vibrant bond with motion in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement."

In partnering with the dancers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she noted. "I speak with the performers to get a understanding of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their muscles are sensing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, stage design and music creators, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing persons, establish a connection through our affection of movement and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the senses led by visual impairment."

The artist added: "While the view of the performance, the gorgeous display, is there facing the audience, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind patrons alike into the unseen. What I wish is that, when audience members depart, they experience performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose recordings have gathered more than 3.5 billion streams, said the spoken narration created a rapport between blindness and sight "by means of a soundscape, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not just a description of a performance. It is the performance itself."

International Dance Event Partners

The company's international partners for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will furthermore offer access to exclusive material, practice sessions and recently created pieces – broadcast in real-time via their official platform.